bo en

Busting up negative connotations associated with certain sounds and styles, Calum Bowen combines video game music, elevator jazz, jingles, plastic soul, and more to make pop songs that are as compelling as they are eccentric.

In the video game “Lovely Planet”, your gun fires tiny purple cubes. When you kill an enemy (though the notion of actually killing anything seems too severe for “Lovely Planet”), the gun exhales a cloud of multi-colored stars. Everything in “Lovely Planet”’s world—even the bad guys—looks like something you might give an infant to teethe on.

The game’s soundtrack is zippy and optimistic too. Sometimes it feels like a 1960s ad jingle, sometimes like elevator jazz played at maniac speed. Its texture is brittle, but the actual compositions are intricate and romantic, lit by the kind of old-Hollywood harmonies you might hear in The Sound of Music or on a Harry Nilsson record—the fantasia of a 100-person orchestra rendered in the primary colors of a dial tone.

Its composer is a guy named Calum Bowen, who also records little, eccentric pop songs as bo en. Bowen is 23 and lives in London, where he has just blown the better part of Sunday in bed with “Super Smash Bros.” (“day of rest,” he says). A few days earlier, he’d been in Paris, in part for a bachelor party and in part to play a bo en show for Jack댄스, a bimonthly party affiliated with contorted electronic pop collective PC Music.

“It was pretty good,” he says. “Kinda strange, because I was the only person not doing a one-tempo, no-stopping DJ set kind of thing.” Bowen, whose music is fizzy and electronic but not dancey per se, says he’s often in that position—a square peg, a weird sell. “I think people enjoyed it,” he says, “but it cleared the dancefloor a little bit.” He laughs—a wordless sign that he understands why.

The PC Music connection makes sense, but is also a red herring—bo en’s sound is less obscure, less impersonal. His debut, 2013’s Pale Machine, has the bright, supersaturated atmosphere of a Michel Gondry movie, alien on the surface but homespun at heart. He describes his songs as “diary entries” and “deeply earnest,” set in the context of music “that people might think is stupid, or has no merit.”

There’s an argument here, a minor posture—a postmodern “trash-as-treasure” stance—but Bowen seems to wear it naturally. “It came through liking a lot of music which I felt was really great that a lot of people didn’t like because of the associations of the sounds,” he says. A goal for a song called “Money Won’t Pay”, described in passing: “Let’s try and make something that’s really fucking good that uses a lot of MIDI banjo.”

Bowen makes money composing music for games, a small business he got off the ground after college at the University of Sussex, near Brighton. He’d studied classical composition, but his hobbies never formally crossed with his schooling. “I was always thinking about video games in the back of my head,” he says. Bo en arose naturally—an interest in wanting to compress his soundtrack work down into more digestible forms.

For the moment, there is no master plan, no brand strategy other than to take his time, try to write and produce for other people, and keep bo en his darling. In February, he re-released Pale Machine as an “expansion pack” that included mini games for every song on the album (at least one of which, a surreal morning time adventure by a designer named Ben Esposito, is delightful), as well as a physical release: a pink felt case, “hand-sewn, really nicely, by my girlfriend,” Bowen says, “who wasn’t at all annoyed to do it.” We agree to stress that last part.

"People shouldn’t dislike music just because
it has a certain sound or association."

Pitchfork: You say there are certain styles of music that you think have bad cultural associations. Can you be more specific?

Calum Bowen: Well, I had a clash between the content that I liked and was interested in—which was mostly influenced by jazz and soul—and the broad associations that those came with. For example, funk and soul are so often this swaggering, hugely self-confident, “I’m gonna shag her” music. So if you don’t feel like that’s particularly representative of your character, but you want to engage with the content of funk, you’re in a bit of a sticky situation. That’s what interests me, really—trying to pick apart the way people identify with genres and sounds and things I see as superficial. I realize that it sort of comes down to, [assumes deep professorial voice] “Oh, well I care about the actual music.” That’s not how I want to be seen, of course, but there’s a little bit of that—people shouldn’t dislike music just because it has a certain sound or association.

Pitchfork: Did you have an epiphany moment with video game music?

CB: It’s not very hard to be into game music if you play games, just by the repetition of it. It’s really the best marketing ploy. That makes me sound like I think video game music is crap—I love it, obviously. I do remember a moment of being in our loft and having this tiny keyboard and thinking I was going to learn how to play the songs from “The Legend of Zelda”. Then, when I was a teenager, I was in a video game cover band. It was just me and my friend and a keyboard, with him on the top end and me on the bottom end, because I wasn’t very good so I just had to play the bass notes. We were called Atomic Face and we played one gig at a “festival” in someone’s backyard.

CB: Bo en started with me getting into Japanese electronic music through various blogs. Eventually I came across [Japanese label] Maltine Records, which I later released [Pale Machine] through. I was just really into the imaginative creativity and elaborate approach to production. My main inspiration was Avec Avec, who I later did a song with.

I’d wanted to get into songwriting for other people for ages, so I just sent [Japanese pop singer] Yun*chi a Twitter message and she was surprisingly open. I was expecting to have to write out a long email saying, “This is why you should let me do it and this is how I will do it and it’ll be great!” But she just said, “Yeah, let’s do it.” I met up with her when she came to London for an event. She was very keen to be taken out clubbing, and I thought, “Oh God, I’m the worst person to be asked to do that.” In the end we just went to a super-duper old-man English pub. It was, surprisingly, a lot of fun.

Pitchfork: Do you have a fascination with Japan that goes beyond music?

CB: People often assume I’m a big Japanophile, but it’s not really the case. Most people who are my age who grew up playing video games or watching Studio Ghibli films have this romanticized image of Japan, so there’s that, but it was about finding music that seemed to be taking a similar approach to what I was really excited by.

CB: They’re extremely enthusiastic: [cheerful parental voice] “Oh, play us that battle theme, please!” So I have to be the ungrateful subject: “Go away Mom, stop being so interested in my life!” It’s lovely but I get a bit embarrassed, with my parents listening to all my [deep professorial voice again] personal, emotional music. But they don’t have any particular musical background.